Successful Greek Business Leaders in Greece and the United States: A Comparative Study of Two Cultures

The Concept

The basic idea behind the project is to compare the successful Greek business people in the USA with those in Greece. Many thoughts contributed toward this project. The first is  the question often asked: “why is it that so many Greeks found it, and still find it, easy to create a successful business in the US?” Conventional Comparative Management literature advocates that it is the “environment” that accounts for the majority of success in business rather than a person’s heritage or genes. Most people believe that the US has an environment that is more conducive to business success than Greece. Some ten years ago I started drafting some ideas about doing some research on this issue but I got sidetracked by a book in Greek which was published in 1999 entitled The Enterprise in the 21st Century [Η Επιχείρηση στον 21ο Αιώνα] (Ellinika Grammata). A few years ago I started reading some “light” stuff in Greek like novels and biographies. For some reason every book I read revolved around Greek people in business that came from Asia Minor and the Pontos. Obviously this finding surprised me and I decided to do some more thinking and reading.

So I began to think maybe it wasn't the US environment and its huge market that accounted for the success of the Greeks in the US. Maybe it was the "size of the fight in the dog, and not the size of the dog in the fight." In other words maybe it was the "burn" inside these people and not the size of the market or the type of the government and all these other things we call the business environment. The Greeks who came from Asia Minor to Greece in the late 1920s found a business environment that was miserable. Greece was ravaged by numerous disastrous wars against its neighbors in pursuance of the Megali Idea. Yet within a generation these devastated refuges created some rather impressive businesses that still dominate the Greek business establishment. Actually if only a small portion of the descriptions of the adversities these entrepreneurs encountered by the native Greeks were to be true their actions were indeed heroic. My personal experience with Greek business people in the US confirms this assertion. Greeks who managed to create serious business in the US, from the small corner gyro and souvlaki shop, to huge groups of restaurants and other food related business all tell the same story: It wasn't easy, my friend! ... you can download the whole study here (Acrobat pdf format)